In 1895 T. Thomas Fortune, then editor of the New York Age, and founder of the Afro-American League in 1890, was considered one of the leaders of African America. That year he gave an address at the Congress on Africa which met in Atlanta in connection … Read More(1895) T. Thomas Fortune, “The Nationalization of Africa”
Virginia-born John Henry Smyth, late 19th Century lawyer and diplomat, had spent nearly five years as the U.S. Minister to Liberia, representing both President Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur. He was given an L.L. D. degree by Liberia College and appointed Knight Commander … Read More(1895) John H. Smyth, “The African in Africa and the African in America”
In an address to women of the graduating class of the Colored High School in Washington, D.C. on June 6th 1884, Rev. Alexander Crummell urges them to put their intellect and their education in the service of racial advancement. The address appears below. Young Ladies: … Read More(1884), Alexander Crummell, “Excellence, an End of the Trained Intellect”
On September 13, 1886, Alexander Crummell preached a sermon at his church, St. Luke’s Church in Washington, D.C. where he challenged many of the prevailing ideas about the importance of classical education. His sermon is reprinted below. That the soul should be without knowledge is … Read More(1886) Alexander Crummell, “Common Sense in Common Schooling”
Five months after Booker T. Washington had announced his policy of accommodation at the Atlanta Exposition, John Hope, then a member of the faculty at Atlanta Baptist College, delivered his rebuttal in a speech before a black debating society in Nashville on George Washington’s birthday, … Read More(1896) John Hope, “We Are Struggling For Equality”
Margaret Murray Washington, the third wife of Booker T. Washington was a well-known educator and women’s activist in her own right before she married the founder of Tuskegee. She continued that activism during their marriage. The Washingtons gave twin lectures at Old Bethel A.M.E. Church … Read More(1898) Margaret Murray Washington, “We Must Have a Cleaner Social Morality,”
New York City newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune in 1887 called upon African Americans to form an organization to fight for the rights denied them. Three years later the National Afro-American League, became the first black civil rights organization in the United States. One hundred … Read More(1890) T. Thomas Fortune, “It Is Time To Call A Halt”
W.E.B. Du Bois would eventually emerge as a founder of the NAACP, a leading human rights activists and the most important African American intellectual of the 20th Century. However those developments lay in the future when the 32-year-old DuBois gave the closing address at the … Read More(1900) W.E.B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World”
America. Born free in North Carolina in 1854, Price attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where he garnered numerous oratorical prizes and graduated as valedictorian in 1879. Two years later as a delegate of the A.M.E. Zion Church to the World’s Ecumenical Conference of Methodism, held … Read More(1890) Joseph C. Price, “Education and the Problem”
Ida B. Wells emerged in the 1890s as the leading voice against the lynching of African Americans following the violent lynching of three of her friends. Beginning with an editorial in newspaper she owned, Memphis Free Speech in 1892 shortly after their deaths, she organized … Read More(1893) Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law In All Its Phases”
